Friday, April 3, 2009

Best Practice of Education2009 Workshop

Last Saturday March 28th Best Practice of Education Conference was held. The presentations took place on Friday, Saturday and Sunday, and keynote speakers like Pathfinder Linden were among those who spoke about Second LIfe and its use for Educational Purposes.

Inside our MUVEnation group, some participants decided to take part in BPE2009 and offer a workshop. Among the 4 groups, together with two more colleagues we decided to participate and give a presentation.

We chose 'Educational Boards' to show young SL educators how they are managed for different purposes. Fabrizia and Morgen,my two colleagues from MUVEnation group joined and together we discussed about our presentation.

After several in-world meetings a whole workshop came up. We agreed that I would start presenting 2 educational Boards as : Xytext Notecard reader and Brainboard 4.0, both belonging to Gavin Dudeney's creations.



Fabrizia decided to present a PictureBoard and a Brochure display where textures can be added to the board and it can also be used as a Hud, giving more freedom to the user and to be able to display the textures without much interference.a>

In the brochure you can add landmarks and it also displays pictures enlarged that are better seen by the audience. As the following picture shows.



Morgen presented a tool that was very easy to manage, since you just pass textures to the board and they are automatically shown. This gives an extra advantage to educators in SL enabling teachers to use these tools in an easy way.

Joining the 4 tools we decided to round up the workshop asking the participants to imagine a class where some of these tools were part of their teaching.



Participants were eager trying the different tools, asking details about resizing boards and textures and found extra uses to be applied in their classes.

After our first successful Conference presentaion, we joined next to a sign that Marga, our tutor in MUVEnation built to gather participants to show the works that the 4 different groups presented. Unfortunately I was not present when the pictures were taken, but I managed to add myself as this pictures shows....



Most of the members of the presenters groups gather and finally we celebrated with 'red wine' the success of each other's presentations.
It was a nice way to know how to :

*face difficulties while giving your workshop
*understand the importance of rehearsing
*know how to work and develop an activity in collaboration with others avatars
*understand the importance of sharing information with your colleagues so as to be
ready to cover each other's job
*take advantage of strengthening your bonds with colleagues in activities like this

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